Hi Everyone,I work for a firm where we receive drawings from a wide variety of companies, architects, mechanical engineers, county offices, and the list goes on and on.Some of the drawings we receive contain a large amount of stuff that we cannot see or find. We turn on all the layers and purge and purge until there are no longer any items to be purged. But, still some drawings are several megabytes larger than they should be. We have tried and tried to make the drawings smaller all without result.Does anyone know of something we have not done that we need to do? Or does anyone know of a technique that can be used that will get rid of all the garbage that might come with a file?Thanks in advance for your help...David in NY

You can e.g. use Killdots to erase "null" entities from your drawings - see:
http://www.cadforum.cz/cadforum_en/qaID.asp?tip=3844
 
But as a general rule - you can WBLOCK the visible part of the drawing to get rid of the unseen items. You can also erase the invisible (but selectable) objects by using the "All" option in the ERASE command select objects prompt, and then use the Remove option and visual select (e.g. by crossing window) to keep only the selected/visible entities.

Hi David,
On the command line type this:
(ssget "x") [Enter]
E [Enter]
P [Enter] (After this command everything visible should be shown selected)
While holding down the "Shift" key select everything in model space.  [Enter]
After you should see how many objects were erased that were not visible.
 
Try running a purge and make sure you purge nested objects and your drawing size should be reduced.  You might also try running an audit as well.  Hope this helps.